The volatility of oil prices coupled with an increasing demand for replacing petrochemical products with sustainable, bio-derived alternatives has seen a considerable amount of research effort being directed toward identifying biologically derived materials that can function as or be converted into industrially useful compounds.
1,8-cineole (hereinafter simply referred to as cineole) is a naturally occurring organic compound that may be extracted from a variety of plant species such as bay, tea tree, mugwort, sweet basil, wormwood, rosemary, sage and eucalyptus.
Cineole is the dominant component (c.a. 90 wt %) of eucalyptus oil, which is a generic collective name for oils extracted from the eucalyptus genus. The predominance of cineole in eucalyptus oil is reflected by the compounds more common name “eucalyptol”.
With the volume of eucalyptus oil production increasing and its cost correspondingly decreasing, cineole presents as an attractive renewable feedstock for the production of industrially useful compounds.
An opportunity therefore remains to develop a process for converting cineole into one or more other useful compounds.